Jarrett Walker's personal notes on places, arts, plants, and the search for home.

2015.11.29

Almost five years ago, the heart of Christchurch, New Zealand was smashed to rubble. The February 2011 earthquake didn't just take lives and destroy property; it wrecked almost everything that defined the city's character and formed its face to the world.

(Should I speak only of the face, then, rather than the heart? Are travelers in any position to know the hearts of cities, however often they return to them?)

I look now at the photos from my joyous 2009 visit to the city, which I posted after the quake but before I returned there. Almost everything I had photographed is damaged and closed (the Art Centre) or ruined beyond repair (the Cathedral) or simply gone (the intimate mainstreets, and the historic buildings of nearby Lyttleton). Gone too are many things I wouldn't have photographed: an entire skyline of concrete modernist buildings has vanished. Just a few still stand, plywooded and tagged. This one has a new banner promising it will be a hotel next year.

Here is the former visitor's centre, the clock an absent face:

One concrete building, once part of a long row of brick or wood storefronts, is now the sole fossil of a vanished row of shops.

And it is hard not to look at the cathedral, still easily mistaken for a ruin of war:

Of course the work and talk is of recovery. What else would humans talk of? Urbanists heap praise on the downtown shopping area made of shipping containers, an early attempt to create some life in the ruins. One fine new building, a public transport interchange, is already up and running, and within a few years there will be a 5-10 story brand-new city in the blocks around it, just south of the cathedral square. A department store has reopened downtown, which is more than many cities this size can boast.

But forgive me if that's not all I notice on cold overcast Sunday evening in the nearly deserted city. Like anyone who knew Christchurch as it was, I walk through a city of absences, the lost city always flickering in peripheral vision. If I turned quickly enough, and with a certain intent, I might be back in the mainstreet of local shops, ordinary or eccentric, each with an office or residence above. A shopkeeper chatting with friends might look up at me casually, willing but not desperate to sell me a thirdhand book, or a piercing, or a faded Victorian pillow. Nobody was rich or striving on that street, but visitors like me loved the dusty oddity and gentleness -- qualities that no amount of money can restore.

A few of those people died in their shops, and all were scattered, lives and livelihoods smashed. So there's been loving and grieving to do, and art does most of that work. New Zealanders have long done quirky and cheerful public art. (The traffic sheep, which are both bollards and benches, are a fine example.) Kiwis are also among the world's great gardeners, especially with their brown-and-teal native flora. Here all that comes together around the Cathedral's ruins.

Over and over, I saw art and plants patching things together: Here, a fine mural on a damaged building, a row of planters hanging from a fence, and, in the lower right, a shiny designer bench.

Art is the key, so let me end, as I did in my last Christchurch post, at the Art Centre. A re-use of an old college, it was a huge warren of little artists' studios, the sort of place that made a life in the arts possible for many talented people. Mercifully, it did not quite fall down.

New Zealand rarely experiences huge floods of investment -- what Jane Jacobs called "catastrophic money" -- and on balance this is one of its virtues. The money hesitates and dribbles. There are plenty of questions. What is Christchurch about now? Is it just a regional service center for the South Island, a place to go for surgery or furniture? Will it find a new purpose?

Or will the arts and plants be its salvation? Both remain the essence of what Christchurch will still have when all this is over. The great parks are still here, and the Botanic Gardens still have their astonishing trees -- including Californian giants that can't be 200 years old, but look much vaster and older. The Art Centre will be put back together, and manages to look like art now and then in the process:

Across the street, the Art Gallery tells us, in neon, from behind its cyclone fence, that "everything is going to be alright." Only the doubt-admitting voice of art can say this with any credibility.

Art and plants. There is no other way, I think, to market and mourn a city, at the same time.

2010.10.03

Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is so ideally suited to being abandoned in a hotel that I have already done it once, by accident, and will soon do it again, by intention. Of course, that means I've bought it twice, and therefore had an outsized impact on perpetuating all the ravages of bestsellerdom. And that means I owe the cosmos a small apology.

I bought it because, well, I enjoyed The Corrections, Franzen's last major novel published nine years ago. I certainly didn't experience The Corrections to be major groundbreaking literature, because when you subtracted the obvious influences of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, there wasn't all that much left. But it sounded like a talented young writer riffing in admiration of his own influences, and that's a perfectly sound basis for a first book. Obviously, being published a week before 9/11 will make any book seem prophetic, and if The Corrections helped readers discover the genuine originality of De Lillo and Wallace, a purpose was served.

So I bought Freedom. I hesitated, because I prefer to buy books that appear in modest single piles, if not in singles on shelves, and it was hard to find a bookstore that wasn't shoving it at me in big standing displays that presented 15 copies of the book, face out and side by side, as though I might want to choose among them.

But hey, I thought. I admire De Lillo and Wallace, and so does Franzen, and I'm going to be in a lot of hotels.

The first time, I abandoned it in a hotel by accident. I realized at the time that I could live without finishing it, but it was my read-in-bed-before-going-to-sleep novel, and one wants a certain comfort and reliability in that genre. By that time, about 1/3 of the way through. I knew the characters, enjoyed watching them bounce around in their box, and most important, knew that they would never do anything to really upset me. They were like very small mammalian pets who are adorable precisely because they take their lives so seriously -- even though to me their lives look pretty small and, well, now that you mention it, it's kind of hard to tell them apart.

[T]he (admittedly brilliant) storytelling loses some of its luster when you consider what Franzen is employing his formidable talents for. This is yet another book about white upper-middle-class comfortable assholes who do horrible things to themselves and each other because they can't seem to make their lives as perfect as they would like them to be.

It's more extreme than that. Everybody in Freedom is white, straight, and more or less middle class, with the rule-proving exception of a young South Asian woman whose purpose is to be the light of Walter Berglund's late middle age. She makes him feel young again, encourages his idealism, and therefore dies in a car crash as soon as the time comes for Walter's family to come back together for a happy ending -- all well-trodden clichés for a feminine Other. This woman has a sparking personality and intelligence and interesting flaws, but of course we see nothing of her inner life. Only white people have those.

In fact, only one character in the novel could even be called creative or artistic, the rock musician Richard Katz. He, too, has a standard role to play: Walter's lifelong friend and sexual rival, who is finally reduced to irrelevance by his own inability to commit to a woman for more than 15 minutes. Katz does have some inner life: he ruminates endlessly about right and wrong, Hamlet-like, while deferring to "the divining rod in his pants" to handle all the exigencies of action. Even artists are a cliché in this book. Good thing none of them are reading.

It feels shallowly politically correct, in a narrowly American way, to judge a novel based on a demographic census of its characters, but I did really feel hit-over-the-head with the lack of diversity of any kind. Can the literary triumph of 2010 really be a novel in which only straight, white, middle class, non-artistic people are expected to have interesting inner lives -- and who use their 550+ pages of fame to reveal that, well, they're cute and harmless but not really all that interesting?

2009.09.01

Except that I think it's the first period of design that's fundamentally kind. Compared to it, every older style seems to be so clearly about power -- the power of one dead man over others.

This isn't to say that the builders of the Gothic cathedrals or the painters of Baroque gold leaf weren't kind people, but still, those styles, indeed, all the styles I can think of before about 1890, were clearly meant to convey power, to put you in your place. They were about the power of God, or of the state, or in most cases both kinds of power in symbiosis.

Why does Art Nouveau seem so unsuited to the eternal agenda of power? Is it because, for the first time, a style of design seemed to reflect the raw beauty of the organic, of life itself?

Until then, the only beauty that design had noticed -- apart from landscape as captured in painting -- was that of the human body. Art Nouveau took its inspiration from the calmer beauty of plants, a beauty that's really unsuited to power agendas of any kind. The artist, of course, is appearing as a power center for the first time in these years. Art Nouveau could serve the cult of the artist, of course, but it doesn't transfer well to any larger power, whether of state or church.

Even Impressionism in painting -- barely a decade older than Art Nouveau -- is always very much about how nature strikes human eyes. It's about the psychology of human perception. And while there's no avoiding that topic when discussing any art, Art Nouveau seemed aware of an organic essence of all things, and that this essence would would go on without us, and that it could be beautiful.

2008.12.25

Several working-class straight men are sharing a flat in London, all leading what seem like tedious and despairing lives. Suddenly, a man who used to be one of them comes home to visit, and brings his new and attractive wife. It feels like she's the first woman they've encountered in years. One of them offers to pour her a glass of scotch.

HE: Rocks?SHE: Rocks? What would you know about rocks?HE: We have rocks, but they're frozen stiff in the fridge.

This joke is all I remember of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, but it's enough. The whole play is right there. As soon as you recognise that rocks = testicles, you've got the big payoff, but as in both fireworks and sex, the significance of the big explosion relies on the little explosions all around it. (Perhaps I should just call them plosions, as they are really both ex- and im-.)

I don't have Pinter's texts with me at home in Sydney, and have scarcely looked at them for a decade. Today, reading of his death, I marvel at how much of it is still in my head, remembered the way one remembers great passages of poetry. Yet most of Pinter is not poetic. Poetry requires at least the pretense of a subject, an observing and experiencing consciousness; in Pinter, there are always at least two people in the room, and his subject is not their consciousness but the tightly-stretched cord of mutual dependence that stretches between them, throbbing.

The Pinter play that sticks with me best is Old Times. A married couple are visited by a third woman, a very close friend of the wife from the years before she met him. Was it a lesbian relationship? Pinter uses that uncertainty to unfold deeper ones, so that by the end the question seems trivial and reductive, like reducing Buddhism to the question of whether to eat meat.

Here's the opening, also from my memory. The couple at home in the livingroom, sitting apart:

SHE: Dark.(pause)HE: Fat or thin?SHE: Fuller than me I think.HE: She was then?SHE: I think so.HE: She may not be now.

Again, it's all there. The other woman's place in the wife's memories, her husband's relentless curiosity about those years, his desire to conquer and own them. Failing that, his need to build the wall between then and now, to defend his turf.

The other woman turns out to be lively, extroverted, and powerful, quite the opposite of the wife, so it's this woman who tells most of the stories about their time together ("Queueing all night -- the rain! -- do you remember?") But finally, near the end, the wife turns to her and says: "But I remember you. I remember you dead." From this unfolds a soliloquy in which she remembers sitting naked by the dead woman, watching her decompose, feeling "that by dying alone and dirty you had acted with proper decorum."

I haven't spoiled the ending, because there isn't one. After all, the "dead" woman is there, in front of us, looking not just alive but lively. The sense that this play makes lies outside the play's events, in the cords that form the triangle without which none of these people could exist at all.

I'm not usually very interested in love triangles, but Old Times is the play I would most want to direct if I ever went back to directing. It is Pinter at his best, and at his least political. If you feel like reading a play to remember him, read it.

2008.10.24

Based on Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare's most
bloodthirsty tragedy, the script by the German playwright Heiner
Muller [sic] breaks up the original text with poetic commentary about the
futility of war. The Sydney audience will receive the message in
particularly graphic fashion; the shape of the Opera House stage
means blood flies off the set and on to those in the front row.

"But don't worry, it washes straight off in an ordinary spin
cycle," said the stage manager, Peter Sutherland.

I guess we won't be going out for drinks after the show.

In one of my former lives, I did a PhD in theatre and spent many days in "black boxes," theatres so tiny that mishurled blood might as easily hit the back row as the front. Last night, walking home through Sydney's arts-and-warehouse district of Surry Hills, I took a back street and noticed a man standing up ahead, gazing at me expectantly. As I approached he asked "Are you here for the performance?" He was facing an open door in a nondescript industrial building, with very small-print newspaper articles pasted up in it -- reviews, no doubt. We were the only two people on the entire street, and there was no sign of anyone inside.

I was him once. I could still be him -- he was about my age. I don't think for a moment that my choices were better than his. And yet the desperation of microtheatre and startup theatre and the black box in general feels like another era right now.

"No, I'm sorry, just walking home."

"Are you sure, mate?"

Sigh. Don't ask me that. I'm never sure. In fact, it was my years in theatre that knocked all the sureness out of me. All I could do was keep walking, and hope I hadn't just turned down a life-changing offer from the angel of sincerity.

2007.11.20

The jacarandas have bloomed in Sydney, a little later than usual. For a week or two, the city was covered with big lavender polka-dots, standing out like the aliens they are
against the ambient green and orange. The trees themselves aren't interesting to photograph, but I had a pleasant half hour looking
at lavender blossoms on someone's dark blue car. It yielded a monochrome effect, with reflected accents
of both city and tree.

2005.11.24

To me, it was beautiful even when I didn't, and the vague sense that I should recognize it created a not-unpleasant bridge between my sense of abstract beauty and my daily anxiety about knowing the right stuff.

It's a sculpture by James Koester, part of a series now showing through Sunday at JEM Gallery, 225 E Broadway in Vancouver, BC. Stop by if you're in town.

It consists of phosphorescent green lines of metal, floating on pins in a metal box. (In some pictures, you can see the line's shadow on the box, which creates a quivering feel.) The phosphorescent lines glow in the dark, and also look good peering through fog. (A fog machine was provided at the opening just for this effect.) One version of this sculpture is 10 feet long.

Once I did recognize the shape all kinds of interesting stuff flowed in. It's an spot of geography most of us have stared at maps of at one time or another, one that carries an almost unbearable spiritual and emotional charge: The long line is the Jordan River, with the Dead Sea on the left, the Sea of Galilee on the right. For countless people, this is a map of redemption, or covenant, or terror, or despair, though it is also quite plainly a map of water in the desert, which is all that will matter in the end. As water, it is also a map of history, since the Dead Sea has shrunk quite a bit since James selected this image.

James's work with geography obviously touches an obsession of mine. He
chooses simple water-lines out of the "real world," then renders them as abstract. Like photorealist painting,
or photography for that matter, the art is partly in the frame -- the
fact that artist's chose this exact bit of geography, and that every fjord in Greenland, for example, deserved his attention.

But they're also simply beautiful shapes, whose beauty is in both their realism and their abstraction. Koester's work invites me to open an atlas and experience each coastline or river as he would render it -- a wiggling form in space. And since rivers and coastlines change every day, it is a beauty that we will always have, in abundance.

2005.10.24

Two weeks back, I wrote briefly about the unphotographable nature of autumn in the rainforest belt, where Vancouver lies. It's a particular type of unphotographability, one where the world is still rich with detail, but the enveloping grey has pushed everything closer together, so that one can no longer stand back.

Here in Tucson for a few days, I have encountered the opposite problem. It's sunny, perfect photography weather, but I can drive for mile after mile after mile through the perfect one-mile grid of arterials and see literally nothing that matters. Nothing that's distinct. Nothing that deserves to be remembered.

Perhaps someday a genius interpreter will read the suburban boulevard as music, with "Burger King" and "Payless Shoe Source" etc as the individually tedious notes whose arrangement is as unique as a snowflake, and that marks the 4300 block of Speedway Boulevard as a work of art. I'm sure that however uniform it looks, there is indeed only one place where the Burger King is direct across from the Super Valu, followed by McDonalds, Arby's, Radio Shack, and Wells Fargo Bank, and K-Mart in precisely that order, with the mobile-home java hut configured just so in the parking lot. Perhaps there are esoteric patterns in the citywide constellation of Burger Kings that speak to a city's soul.

But I am not that genius interpreter.

James Howard Kunstler was here long before me, in Home from Nowhere, with the simple articulation that in the suburban arterial grid, we have succeeded in mass-producing places that are not worth caring about, places that can barely support the appellation of "place." (In fact, he seems to be back on this topic just today.) I've known this for 20 years, but now that I travel with a digital camera, I become more conscious about what moves me to photograph. And it's not here. Or when it is, it's the desperate exception that proves the rule:

2005.08.14

So the other day, I went looking for the arts in Vancouver. Visual arts, at least. So I figured, start at the main museum.

There are two, and the apartheid they imply is at once a little spooky. There's a world class museum of this region's aboriginal arts, known as the UBC Museum of Anthropology, which curates not just pre-contact cultural artefacts but also the arts of Aboriginal descendants. The UBC museum is a great place, and more about it later.

(Still, did I get that right? If you're anglo, your work is art, but if you're of aboriginal descent, your work is anthropology?)

Then, as the central all-purpose art museum of the city, there's the Vancouver Art Gallery. It certainly looks like the official city museum: A bannered historic building on a central square, facing a park, complete with a dramatic sweeping stairway leading to a permanently locked door, and sign telling you to enter around on the side. Looks like the major museum to me.

What's here? Four floors, of which three are visiting exhibitions. Currently, we have one floor of Table Scraps from Great Museums of Europe (currently Rodin, whose method of casting threw off lots of table scraps on the way to each Great Work). Then, we have two floors of Transgressive Postmodern Terminal Hipness, also mostly from Europe. Then, on the top floor, we have the permanent collection and the the sole exhibit area devoted to British Columbia artists.

It consists of one artist: Emily Carr. If you come looking for some sense of the range and diversity in the history of BC arts (as opposed to anthroplogies!), this appears to be it. And if you look around the rest of the arts scene, well, if it isn't Emily Carr, then it probably graduated from Emily Carr Institute, the leading local art school. Her name is a little like the name Washington in America; so ubiquitous that it's hard to focus on what if anything it means.

I like Emily Carr. Certainly, her biography appeals, perhaps because it is almost stereotypical for a great artist: a family ignorant of the arts, financial and health struggles, belated recognition, and above all a searing lifelong solitude. Photographs of her as an old woman, an obviously prickly character living in a camper in the rainforest, could almost have been Georgia O'Keeffe -- just subtract money, and add water.

Her hard-textured expressionist landscapes capture the enclosing and disorienting quality of the coastal rainforest, where even the outdoors is divided into hallways, rooms, closets. She renders foliage as cloth, but the cloth never flows; it feels more like velvet: heavy, static, suffocating. Sometimes it seems to be laminated or shellacked. You can walk in her rainforest and feel the repressions of her rural childhood. In short, this is classic mid-century expressionism. She learned it in Europe, brought it home, applied it to her world, and created something that met the need when BC finally became urban enough to need a great local artist.

In short, like anyone else that we'd call a success, she found a need and filled it, or perhaps a need, seeking fulfillment, found her. Either way, she has a permanent floor in the center of Vancouver, and more power to her. Still, I wonder how she'd feel to know that decades after her death, she'd still be the last word in official BC arts.

2005.02.13

Miller never gave up that stubborn social conscience that made his dramaturgy seem so unhip.

In the 80s, when I was studying theatre, Miller had zero respect in the academy. In Stanford's department, where we scurried beneath a portrait of Bertolt Brecht that rose to Dear Leader scale, Miller was, at best, a kind of Cliffs-Notes rendition of the German master. For the postmodernists, then up and coming, Miller was so sincere as to be unworthy of parody. He was history, we thought, when we even thought of him.

When we did think of him, we made an occasional nod to Death of a Salesman.(I remember encountering just the title at age 5 or so, when it engaged me like the great and devastating poem it still is.) It's one of most enduringly popular indictments of the American dream, and fused American realism with Greek tragedy far more effectively than Eugene O'Neill's hammer-handed attempts.

And yet Salesman may not be Miller's greatest achievement. Later, when my career called on me to drive around many ordinary suburbs and small cities, I kept seeing banners announcing the local high school production of The Crucible. Unsung in the obituaries, Miller's play about the Salem witch trials -- a thinly disguised allegory for the House Un-American Activities Committee -- is much more widely read, and it's taught in the most effective way you can teach any text: Students actually do it. The very features that make it attractive to high schools make it less so to Broadway (many distinctive but simple characters, no overwhelming star "couple," plain language without difficult idiom.)

Live theatre has no future as a popular art, of course. Most people will touch this medium only once, usually in high school. It will be interesting to see how a cultural history of our times might reorganize the canon around what students have actually read, and even "lived" though amateur performance. In forming what remains of America's social conscience, The Crucible may be far more important, and Salesman far less, then the journalists of Broadway would ever suspect.